Hawaii Forensic Psychology

I just did a book review of the mas­sive 5th edi­tion of the Handbook of Social Psychology and came across some­thing quite new. The chap­ter is “Experimental Existential Psychology: Coping with the Facts of Life.”  I thought exis­ten­tial phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­ogy were rel­e­gated to the ’60’s (you know when every­one read Sartre and Camus), or maybe Woody Allen movies. Nope, it is still alive and well and liv­ing in social psy­chol­ogy. The authors intro­duce the con­cept of “ter­ror man­a­gent the­ory.” “The the­ory starts with the propo­si­tion that aware­ness of the inevitabil­ity of death in an ani­mal bio­log­i­cally pre­dis­posed to live cre­ates the poten­tial for ter­ror, which would seri­ously impede goal-directed behav­ior unless man­aged some way.” Maybe there is a con­nect between ter­ror and ter­ror­ist man­age­ment. We will come back to this later.

Reference: Pyszcynski, T., Greenberg, J., Koole, S., & Solomon, S. (2010). Experimental Existential Psychology: Coping with the Facts of Life. In S. Fiske, D.T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.). Handbook of Social Psychology (5th edi­tion). New York: Wiley & Sons, pp. 724–757.